A Gathering of Spirits: Japan's Ghost Story Tradition: From Folklore and Kabuki to Anime and Manga

by Drazen, Patrick

  The fifth and final act takes place in an abandoned house (or temple) at Hebiyama. Iemon has taken refuge there, driven to madness by the ghosts and memories of what he has done. The neighbors try to exorcise the ghost of Oiwa, but she will not be denied her grudge now. The ghost of Oiwa is joined by the living: Yomoshichi, the beloved of Oiwa’s sister, and Ohana, the widow of Iemon’s former servant Kohei. They are poised to take their own vengeance as the curtain falls.

  All things considered, the living visitors were just frosting on the cake; Iemon was amply punished in his life for his own misdeeds, being plagued by the ghosts of his victims as well as other phenomena; in the 1959 version, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan, Iemon sees snakes everwhere. It’s an open question whether being haunted to madness was “enough”. Still, this is similar to the variation in the story of Okiku and the plates in which the lord of the manor was driven to madness by Okiku’s ghost moaning in the well. There are, in Japanese ghost stories at any rate, things worse than death.

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  If you’ve kept track, this synopsis skipped over act 4; so do most modern productions of the play, although in some even shorter versions Iemon throws himself into the canal at the end of act 3. The fourth act, however, is where the ghostly happenings begin in earnest, touching on lives other than Iemon’s, and reflecting attitudes that go beyond, and add another dimension to, the basic ghost story. Act four begins with Naosuke having married Oiwa’s sister Osode, the former prostitute. Things aren’t settled in this household, either: Osode refuses to consummate the marriage with Naosuke, she has to take in washing and sells incense to survive, and in this act ghostly hands reach out of the washtub to strangle Naosuke. Osode finally submits to Naosuke’s amorous demands, only for them to be interrupted by her beloved Yomoshichi, who Osode (among others) thought was dead. She tricks both men into killing her, having already written a suicide note explaining the secret problem: that Naosuke her stalker was actually her brother. When Naosuke finds out, he kills himself. Meanwhile, the ghost of Kohei appears to a member of the ronin seeking revenge against the downfall of their former master Lord Enya. This ronin, Matanojo, is disabled and contemplating suicide. The ghost of Kohei gives him the poisonous medicine that disfigured Oiwa. Matanojo, however, is miraculously healed by it, and this good deed allows Kohei to be reborn into Paradise.

  This is an example of how, as Patrick Macias noted, “Japanese horror films… traditionally fold in the concept of karma, drawn from… Buddhism. Rarely do bad things happen to someone without a good reason. Often a curse, a misdeed in the past needs resolution—and there will be no peace until the balance is restored.”[33] With so much relentless depravity in this story, from embezzlement to incest, from murder to rape, the act of Kohei’s ghost healing Matanojo is a rare glimmer of light, and perhaps should be left in productions of Yotsuya Kaidan as a reminder to the audience that not all ghosts are evil, and that their deeds may even lead to salvation.

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  Along with the various film and TV versions of the Yotsuya Kaidan, an anime version is now available. It was adapted into a four-part television anime as part of the series Ayakashi. The adaptation, directed by Tetsuo Imazawa (who’s worked on TV anime series as different as the historical romance The Rose of Versailles and the wrestling story Kinnikuman, plus movies and OAVs), is a fairly faithful one, although it is still missing the hopeful fourth act. It does include all of the set-pieces for which the play is famous: Oiwa’s ghostly arms reaching out of Osode’s washtub, the lantern that turns into Oiwa’s face, and so on. The fourth episode also includes one new device that would be hard to duplicate onstage: rats, a wave of them, attacking Iemon at the end of the production, much as he was plagued by visions of snakes in the 1959 film version.

  Also in the series are pictures of some of the kabuki effects machinery, photos of the Oiwa shrine, and explanations from the narrator, author Tsuruya Nanboku, who died in 1829. Among his comments to the audience are explanations for the medicine that afflicted Oiwa (which he says was probably not a drug at all but smallpox), a prosaic explanation for the “curse” of the play (with so much stage machinery, he essentially says, accidents will happen—which doesn’t explain why the producer of a recent and successful revival committed suicide during the run), and a rather minimal explanation for the play’s popularity: that people want to see justice brought about by destiny in this manner. Certainly, in the modern world (whether in Japan or anywhere else) it seems that justice is hard to find and karma takes its own time punishing those who need to be punished.

  Of course, the vengeance of Lady Oiwa is far beyond anything that would be handed out by mere mortals. In Japan, Oiwa is the classic example of an onryou, a ghost (more often female than male) who appears for one reason: vengeance. Onryou are often victims of circumstance, like Oiwa; powerless and subject to manipulation by the men in their lives. In death, however, it’s a different story.

  The look of the onryou has become standardized thanks to kabuki theater and the movies. They have three things in common: a white burial shroud, white faces, and, most important, black disheveled hair. This last trait is actually another bit of shorthand symbolism; disordered hair is the sign of a madwoman, and the message can’t be much clearer: you can’t reason with her. You can’t come up with excuses. You can’t appeal to tenderness or mercy. You might as well try talking with the great white shark in Jaws.

  Onryou have significant powers, except that, like Oiwa, they do not directly attack the person most responsible for their grievous condition. Okiku’s ghost likewise didn’t attack her former master, but her lamentations drove him mad. Oiwa also drove the faithless Iemon to madness. After all, killing him would not only have been too easy, it would have simply repeated the bad karma caused by Iemon’s own killings.

  All of this probably sends a mixed message to the modern-day audience: as frustrating as it may be to let things go through channels, or just forego vengeance altogether, do you really want to take a chance on the alternative?

  CHAPTER 12: NOH DRAMA

  Ghosts are a standard, almost required, part of Noh[34] theater, which was a synthesis of courtly and folk performances. Ghosts have been featured Noh performers since Noh was standardized in the 14th century, during the Muromachi period. Of the thousand or so Noh plays that were written, half no longer exist in writing, but those that do often feature some sort of ghost. One reason few Noh plays survive in writing is the way in which Noh was rehearsed and performed: the soloists would rehearse on their own, under the tutelage of an older master. The only time the full cast would get together would be for the performance itself. In other kinds of theater this would seem to be a recipe for disaster, but the slow and stately nature of Noh helps preserve the production.

  An evening of Noh theater is actually a set series of moral-lesson plays mixed with music, dancing, and singing, beginning with the shugen, a celebration of the Shinto spirits that have ruled Japan since its creation. Next comes the shura, a battle-play in which the ghost of a famous warrior (a major character or shite,[35]) appears onstage to a visitor, often a wandering priest (known as a waki). The shite is, more accurately, a maeshite if it’s human in appearance and a nochijite if it appears as a spirit. The warrior spirit is suffering because, no matter how distinguished he was on earth and how honored he was on the field of battle (and that battle usually is the Heike/Taira feud which culminated in the 12th century naval battle at Dan-no-Ura—see chapter 9), he failed to realize a higher form of honor. The third section is the kazura or onnamono. The central spirit here was once a member of court or other high-ranking woman whose soul still haunts the earth, in repentance for some deed or other. This is followed by the Oni-Noh, focusing on realistic people and showing that redemption is possible. Two other sections, extolling traditional virtues and again praising the gods, round off the evening.

  27. The Flutist and the Warrior

  The ghost play Atsumori is one of the Noh dramas based on the history of the Hei
ke wars, and features a ghost slain in battle. The battle is very specific: the battle of Ichi-no-Tani, which took place in C.E. 1184. Atsumori was a youthful samurai of the Taira clan; he’s shown onstage as more of a poet than a warrior. The young samurai even insists on carrying his flute into battle. This is incomprehensible to Kumagai Naozane, a veteran fighter for the Heike clan. Kumagai defeats and slays Atsumori, although he has his misgivings.

  These misgivings come out in the Noh play, which begins with a monk, Rensho, who is actually Kumagai, on a pilgrimage back to the battlefield at Ichi-no-Tani. For years since the slaying of Atsumori, Kumagai has lamented his actions; after all, Kumagai had a son roughly the same age as Atsumori, who was wounded in battle. He also regretted having to fight someone clearly not prepared for the hardships of war. This is brought up in the first act of the play, as Rensho meets and spends some time with a young man who was also a flutist.

  After an interlude (called a kyogen) in which a performer reminds the audience of the circumstances of the story, Rensho is shown praying for the repose of Atsumori’s soul. The young flutist from the first act reappears, revealing himself to be the spirit of Atsumori. He is indeed not able to rest in peace, because his soul is still tied to this world by the emotional circumstances of his death. The ghost of Atsumori reenacts his death, and expects Kumagai to reenact his part in slaying Atsumori. This time, however, the warrior-turned-monk refuses to relive his past, and the ghost of Atsumori declares that Rensho is not his enemy. Unlike so many vengeful ghost stories, in which the survivor still tries to maintain that he was in the right, the two leading characters here actually want to achieve the same thing: peace for Atsumori’s soul.

  28. Modern Western Noh: “The Gull”

  Arts stay the same, and change; this paradox has examples in every culture and country. The Noh theater tradition would seem to be a museum piece, but it’s been used for modern storytelling as well. A 2006 Canadian piece seems to be especially appropriate for the conventions of Noh, including its ghosts.

  The Gull was written by Daphne Marlatt and tells the story of two Japanese-Canadian brothers. As happened on the west coast of America in 1942, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Canada also forcibly relocated its Japanese population at the beginning of World War Two. For the fishermen Waki and Wakitsure, exile didn’t end until 1950, when they were able to go to the village of Steveston, a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, on the north bank of the Fraser River. On their way back to rebuilding their lives, they encounter a part-human, part-bird spirit, who turns out to be the spirit of their dead mother; she exhorts them to return to their Japanese ancestral home of Wakayama-ken instead of staying in Canada. This character is solidly in the Noh tradition: “Ghosts who refused to leave until they were heard by the living symbolize unresolved emotional conflicts that continue after death.”[36] In addition, The Gull fits into Noh’s Buddhist heritage; playwright Marlatt was brought up in Penang, Malaysia, by a Buddhist nanny.

  Marlatt also notes a parallel in her work to another typical aspect of Noh:

  Traditional Noh plays are highly allusive and often weave quotes from the classical poetic repertoire or from other Noh plays into their texts. That’s one of the features of Noh that I find very contemporary and I wanted to keep it alive in my play. However, I realized that quoting from those sources would mean nothing to a Western audience so I chose instead to weave in some lines from poems by the contemporary Canadian poets Roy Miki, Joy Kogawa, and Roy Kiyooka.

  Noh drama isn’t the only medium creating new buildings out of old material; this happens a lot in anime and manga.

  CHAPTER 13: KAIDAN KASANEGAFUCHI

  Yoshihiro Togashi’s manga YuYu Hakusho is the story of a high school delinquent, Yusuke Urameshi, who (when he felt like it) attended Sarayashiki Junior High School. The name of the school evokes the story of Okiku and the ten plates. The manga also has another echo to a classic kaidan in Yusuke’s mortal enemy (at first, anyway) Kuwabara, who sort-of attends Kasanegafuchi High School.

  The “Ghost Story of Kasane Swamp” (Kaidan Kasanegafuchi) was written in the late 1800s by Sanyutei Encho (1839-1900), an author and performer whose works include Botan Doro (“The Peony Lantern;” see chapter 23). He lived and worked in the Meiji era, when Japan was rushing to catch up technologically with the west, and the intelligentsia of Japan declared that a belief in ghosts and demons and nature spirits was “the result of mental illness.” I suspect that, whether he believed in the rush to science and technology or not, Encho seemed to relish trotting out the often lurid ghost stories for which he is remembered.

  Kaidan Kasanegafuchi has been filmed a number of times; the first version in 1926, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Other prominent versions appeared in 1957 (directed by Nobuo Nakagawa, who two years later would direct the full-color and brilliantly staged Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan) and 1970; a film version simply titled Kaidan (Ghost Story) directed by Hideo Nakata, director of Ringu, was released in 2007. This was Nakata’s first period piece, and by most accounts it’s a fine and scary production.[37]

  29. A Curse for Father and Son

  Some ghost stories center around money; many of them center around love. This one involves both. The chain of misery and bad karma begins when an 18th century samurai, Fukami Shinzaemon, borrows some money from a blind merchant (in some versions a masseur) named Soetsu. Shinzaemon, however, takes his own time in repaying the loan; one winter night, Soetsu leaves his wife and his young daughter Rui at home and goes looking for Shinzaemon to collect on the debt.

  Unfortunately, Shinzaemon not only decides to cancel his debt by killing Soetsu but has the body dumped in Kasane swamp. Soetsu’s spirit calls down a curse on the samurai’s family, a curse which has echoes of Yotsuya Kaidan and other classic tales.

  Shinzaemon’s mind is twisted by the curse, he fails to recognize his wife when he sees her and instead slashes her throat. This further maddens the samurai, and he takes his own life. However, this is not the end of the story.

  The story resumes twenty years later, with Shinkichi, the son of Shinzaemon, now grown up and working as a servant to a wealthy man. Shinkichi has found love with a young woman named Hisa, but theirs is a bittersweet forbidden love; Hisa is the daughter of Shinichi’s wealthy employer, and the social distance between them makes it impossible for them to be together except for occasional secret meetings. When a wealthy samurai asks for Hisa’s hand in marriage, Shinichi sneaks into Hisa’s room one night. They are caught, and Shinichi is dismissed as a servant.

  However, he is taken in and cared for by a somewhat older woman who has been interested in him for some time. This older woman is Rui, a music teacher and daughter of the blind moneylender murdered by Shinkichi’s father. Both Rui and Shinichi are unaware of this connection between them; only an elderly servant is aware, and she hasn’t told anyone.

  Even though he too is unaware of this connection, Omura, an Iago-like samurai who knows that Hisa is still interested in Shinkichi, befriends Shinkichi and talks him into eloping with Hisa, then “accidentally” leaves information about the elopement in a letter where Rui can find it. Omura was hoping that Rui would see to it that Shinkichi was arrested at least, preferably beheaded, thus giving Omura free access to the music teacher. However, the curse is still alive. Rui barges in on the couple and tries to kill Hisa herself; instead, she falls down a flight of stairs.

  Rui doesn’t feel the extent of the damage caused by the fall until later. Omura brings Shinkichi another note from Hisa requesting a meeting. Shinkichi is torn between fleeing to his lover and staying by the woman who gave him a home when he was orphaned. Finally, though, he tells Rui he’s going to get her instrument and leaves her; Omura comes back to mock Rui about her faithless Shinkichi.

  This is the moment when Rui decides to look at her face, and finds that the mirror has been taken out of the room. She goes to a water barrel and, when the ripples stop, sees herself: half of her face is torn up and distorted, in an
echo of Oiwa in Yotsuya Kaidan. The elderly servant knows that now is the time to tell Rui about her parents and those of her beloved. As she dies, Rui leaves a threatening note for Shinkichi: “I will haunt your wife to her grave.”

  And she does. Shinkichi and Hisa know that they have to leave town; unfortunately, the road out takes them through the Kasane swamp, where the dominoes seriously start to fall. Shinkichi’s mind is turned by the ghost of the abandoned Rui, and he kills his beloved Hisa. The duplicitous samurai Omura then kills Shinkichi. The ghost of Rui rises up in the swamp, threatening Omura but not killing him. She leaves that to the ghost of Soetsu, the blind moneylender whose murder started the whole tragic cycle.

  CHAPTER 14: PRINCESS OF THE DARK TOWER A/K/A TENSHU MONOGATARI (STORY OF THE CASTLE TOWER)

  Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939) didn’t really exist. It’s the pen name for a prolific and talented writer of the Meiji era, Izumi Kyotaro. His output included novels, short stories, and plays for the Kabuki theater, including Tenshu monogatari (1917). He was introduced to Kabuki through his mother’s family: his mother’s father had been a musician and his uncle was a renowned Noh actor, Kintaro Matsumoto. At age 18 Izumi became an apprentice to Koyo Ozaki, one of the great writers of the day. By 1895 he had published his first major success, the novel Yakoujunsa (The Night Watchman), and remained a prominent writer until his death. His health almost always compromised by one illness or another, Izumi’s work is known for its use of the supernatural (more than half of his writings deal with ghosts or spirits) and dealing very little with jazz, machinery, or other aspects of “modern” life and literature. In a time when Japanese literature focused on young girls being romanced (in reality or fantasy) by older men, Izumi’s works often turned on an older woman aiding a younger man; Tenshu monogatari is, in a sense, one such work.